Diabetes mellitus is a mammalian condition in which the amount of glucose in the blood plasma is abnormally high. This condition can be life-threatening and high glucose levels in the blood plasma (hyperglycemia) can lead to a number of chronic diabetes syndromes, for example, atherosclerosis, microangiopathy, kidney disorders, renal failure, cardiac disease, diabetic retinopathy and other ocular disorders including blindness.
It is a disease of some complexity, as indicated by its effect on a large number of important functions of the body. There are large numbers of sufferers. For example, in the late 1980's over 2.6 million people in the United States were diabetics who were taking insulin by injection daily. Approximately an equal number of diabetics were taking oral hypoglycemic agents and another 2 to 3 million people were controlling the disease by dietary methods alone. It is estimated there are several million people in the U.S. who are undiagnosed diabetics.
In non-diabetics, plasma glucose level is maintained automatically in a complex procedure that involves, inter alia, the hormone insulin. In diabetes, external intervention is needed. Treatment of diabetics is now carried out using several drugs. Insulin is the mainstay of treatment; it replaces the natural hormone produced in the pancreas. In diabetics, insulin is not produced in sufficient quantities, or the body becomes tolerant to insulin and requires more than normal amounts to produce the necessary effect.
Insulin must be given by injection. Insulin cannot be administered orally as it is decomposed before or during passage through the gastrointestinal tract. It is difficult to determine the exact amount required. This can result in overdoses, leading to hypoglycemia, and in inadequate doses, leading to poor control of the disease and the development of secondary complications.
Oral diabetes medications (such as sulphonylureas and biguanides) are available. As with insulin it can be difficult to obtain a correct dose. There has been shown to be a difficulty with the sulphonylureas in correctly regulating blood glucose levels. Hypoglycemic episodes often occur in elderly patients. The biguanides lower blood glucose, but can produce side effects, such as lactic acidosis, which can be fatal.
Sodium orthovanadate has been found to be a potent inhibitor of Na.sup.+ -K.sup.+ ATPase. It has also been found that vanadate (vanadium (V)) taken up by the red blood cells was reduced to vanadium (IV) in the form of vanadyl ion VO.sup.2+ in the cytoplasm. Since this work, there has been interest in the effects of vanadium, mostly as vanadate, on glucose metabolism and uptake into cells. A natural outgrowth of this work has been the study of vanadium and diabetes. (See J. Biol. Chem. 252: 7421-7423 (1977), J. Biol. Chem. 254:1781-1784 (1979) and Diabetes 39: 1-5 (1990)).
The insulin-like effect of the vanadate ion (VO.sub.4.sup.3-) in vitro has been known since 1980 (see Nature 284: 556-558 (1980)) when it was shown that the insulin-like stimulation of glucose oxidation in rat adipocytes was due to the vanadyl ion. In 1985, McNeill et al. (Science 227: 1474-1477 (1985)) reported that vanadate, when administered in drinking water, decreased the elevated blood glucose and prevented the depression of cardiac performance in rats made diabetic with streptozotocin (STZ). Subsequently, there has been interest in the insulin-mimetic effects of both vanadate and vanadyl since Sakurai et al. showed that vanadate is reduced in vivo to vanadyl (Biochem. Biophys. Res. Comm. 96:293-298 (1980)).
Vanadate however has the drawbacks that it is poorly absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract to the blood and that it is toxic. Administered concentrations must be close to the toxic level if the insulin-mimetic effects in mammals are to be achieved.
Work by McNeill et al. (see Am. J. Physiol 257: H904-H911 (1989), Metabolism 38:1022-1028 (1989), Diabetes 38: 1390-1395 (1989) and Can. J. Physiol & Pharmacol. 68: 486-491 (1990)) has shown that vanadyl administered orally as vanadyl sulfate also lowers blood glucose and blood lipids in STZ diabetic rats and prevents secondary complications of diabetes such as cataracts and cardiac dysfunction. Vanadyl sulfate is less toxic than the vanadate form of vanadium but is also poorly absorbed. There have been attempts to modify the biological uptake of vanadium by changing the chemical form in which it is supplied from either vanadate (VO.sub.4.sup.3-) or vanadyl sulfate (VOSO.sub.4. (H.sub.2 O).sub.x). In this regard, the use of various vanadate:peroxide reaction products as insulin mimics has been suggested by Posner et al. (See U.S. Pat. No. 4,882,171, U.S. Pat. No. 5,069,913 Biochem. Biophys. Res. Comm. 147: 259-266 (1987) and J. Biol. Chem. 262: 8252-8256 (1987)).
The use, for the oral treatment of diabetes, of a cysteine complex of vanadium of the formula ##STR1## is described in EP-A-305264. The use of vanadium cysteine complexes was also reported in JP-A-2/292217 by Komatsu et al. However these cysteine complexes are generally not well characterised and only poorly water soluble and thus are not well suited to oral administration. Moreover their utility is further diminished by the relatively long delay between administration and the onset of a blood sugar lowering effect. Komatsu et al. (supra) also proposed the use of a pentane-2,4-dione complex of the vanadyl ion. This however is toxic at effective doses and accordingly is also not well suited to oral administration.
Accordingly, there remains a need for compositions useful in the treatment of diabetes with vanadium and we have found that certain bidentate, monoprotic chelants, with vanadium co-ordinating oxygen, sulphur or nitrogen atoms form vanadium complexes particularly suitable for therapeutic use, especially for oral administration.